Google fouls up Gmail iPhone app

Google had better hope you get more than one shot to make a good first impression. That's because the shiny new Gmail app rolled out for the iPhone and iPad Wednesday contained a pretty serious bug that Google acknowledged broke notifications and "caused users to see an error message when first opening the app."

Google had better hope you get more than one shot to make a good first impression. That's because the shiny new Gmail app rolled out for the iPhone and iPad Wednesday contained a pretty serious bug that Google acknowledged broke notifications and "caused users to see an error message when first opening the app."

Google has temporarily pulled the app from Apple's App Store and is working on a new version that will presumably not break your device's notifications system. The company has not yet given a timeframe for when the new version will be available.

Google's decision to pull the app came around two hours after the company first announced its availability on its Gmail blog. The app contained new bells and whistles that improve on the version of Gmail that comes preloaded onto Androidsmartphones such as the ability to refresh your email automatically by pulling down on the top of the screen, similar to Twitter's mobile refresh capabilities, and the ability to view your inbox's labels simply by swiping right instead of pressing a button and clicking on the labels menu. The application was designed to work on iOS 4 and iOS 5.

Google had been pitching the app specifically to Apple users who may not already be using Gmail, as the company's blog said that the app was "designed to be fast, efficient and take full advantage of the touchscreen and notification capabilities of your device" while also representing "one more reason to switch to Gmail."

November has been a busy month for Gmail so far since Google has also introduced a new version of the popular email software that gives users more power to customize how Gmail looks on their screens. Among other things, Gmail users can now resize their label and chat windows and expand the size of their inbox emails to make for a less-cluttered inbox.